How the south was buried in concrete

The mafia enriched their clans with illegal, brutalist buildings and gaudy, now decaying, villas

If you ask Maurizio Carta what the mafia looks like, he will take you to the residential areas of the Sicilian capital of Palermo. There, hundreds of desolate, grey apartment blocks scar the suburbs and a vast part of the historic centre.

It is the result of a building frenzy of the 1960s and 1970s, when Vito Ciancimino, a mobster from the violent Corleonesi clan, ordered the demolition of splendid art nouveau mansions to make space for brutalist tower blocks. It would go down in history as the “sack of Palermo”.

The Sicilian mafia had declared that urban planning in Palermo was to be controlled by Ciancimino, who in 1959 was made head of public works.

“The word ‘sack’ was not randomly chosen to describe that period,” says Carta, professor of urban planning at Palermo University. “Like plundering barbarians, mafiosi devastated the city with cement.”

Rubble was dumped on the coast, causing the pollution of beaches, many of which remain inaccessible to swimmers today.

“They sent a message to the institutions, making it clear that they, the bosses, had the power to change not only the laws that regulated the urban planning projects and the shape of the city, but also the local climate,” says Carta.

“Palermo had been built to allow the breeze to rebound off the mountains and swirl back down to cool the city. With those towering constructions built along the coast and at the foot of the mountains, Palermo became a hot, muggy, suffocating city.”

In Italy’s southern regions with a history of organised crime, evidence of the mafia lies in the dozens of unfinished and dilapidated constructions on the shores of spectacular beaches, where mobsters with ties to public administrators were permitted to build. And there one can see what is the mafia by looking at the shameless, gaudy villas of bosses, each one a demonstration of strength, just like monarchies and dictatorships.

Architecture for the mafia is not just a display of power, but also a highly profitable business for the clans, which, thanks to corruption in the public works sector and construction firms linked to organised crime, have amassed millions over the years supplying building materials and “unfortified concrete” – comprising sand and water, and very little cement – to build streets, schools, hospitals and bridges in places prone to landslides or flooding, along cliffs, and in high-risk hydrogeological and seismic areas.

In Castel Volturno, about 50km northwest of Naples in a landscape of uncommon beauty, 24,000 illegal constructions have been built, many on the seashore. Thousands have been confiscated or seized and the ruins of others are spread over miles of beach – like archaeological artefacts from a post-apocalyptic disaster.

Things change when the bosses build their own homes. The villas of Sicilian and Camorra bosses were designed to communicate power from an aesthetic standpoint – majestic villas that resemble those of princes.

In the town of Casal di Principe, territory of one of the most powerful Camorra clans, which inspired the TV crime series Gomorrah, boss of bosses Walter Schiavone had a villa built that was the exact model of the home of Tony Montana, the fictional gangster played by Al Pacino in the Brian De Palma film Scarface.

Camorra bosses’ houses are filled with sumptuous luxuries. In 1991 dozens of Italian soldiers raided the mega villa of the powerful Camorra boss Pasquale Galasso, in an area of 30,000 sq metres, with football pitches, saunas and a warehouse that held his personal art museum.

Stolen works of art from around Italy had found their way there. Among the paintings, Louis XIV antiques and ancient statues, investigators were stunned to find a solid gold throne. The throne, it emerged, had once belonged to Francis II of the Bourbon dynasty, the last king of Naples.

Just like the landscape that has been so brutally scarred with the ugly follies and threatening displays of mafia wealth, Galasso had placed his own excessive symbol of power in the middle of his immense living room.

When he turned informant for the Italian judiciary the house was handed over to the authorities. Partially used now as barracks of the Guardia di Finanza, most of it, like so much of Italy’s mafiosa architecture, crumbles away slowly in the sun.

‘Like plundering barbarians, mafiosi devastated the city with cement’ Maurizio Carta Palermo University